Tag Archives: Tilo Schabert

A book never can meet all the expectations readers of it may project on it. Even if its subject wouldn't be treated in one volume only, but in twelve volumes. Nor could its author exhaust, by preventive arguments, all questions that readers, in their encounter with the book, may imagine. The hermeneutical process is endless. This is no reason to…

Das Gesictht der Moderne is a reworked and updated version of a book by Tilo Schabert released by the same publisher 40 years ago under the title Gewalt und Humanität. The first eight chapters of the two books are much the same, bearing in fact exactly the same…

Please see Tilo Schabert's two lectures, available on YouTube.His lecture on "The German Revolution 1989." It is available here.His lecture about the 2017 French Presidential election. It can be found here.

Also available are "A Wise French Accommodation," "The German Question is a European Question," "How the World is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany" and "True Form of Government: Plato…

All forms of political order are phenomena of movements.The classic typology of political constitutions that Plato elaborated and Aristotle modified to an extent therefore represents both: a description of the different constitutions identified – monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and so forth – and the passages from one constitutional form to another, as from an aristocracy to an oligarchy, for example. In…

François Mitterrand related the following episode several times af­terward – to SPD [The German Social Democratic Party] president Hans-Jochen Vogel, Spanish prime minister Felipe González, German chancellor Helmut Kohl, and West German minister of foreign affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and in Cabinet meet­ings. What he had heard the evening of June 8, 1987, in Venice clearly made quite an…

A Critical Assessment[1]Apparently, historiography takes shape in the form of battles. It began at historiography's beginning,[2] when, to cite the most telling example, Cicero called Herodotus the “father of history”[3] and Plutarch branded him as “a liar”.[4] The conflictual habits in historical writing have been lasting ever since.[5] An actual and indeed remarkable case in point is the historiography concerning…

The Eranos Movement: A Story of Hermeneutics. Edited by Tilo Schabert. Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann, 2016.

Reviewing this volume is no small task. It has all the qualities of an edited collection both unique and splendid; its uniqueness owes to the idiosyncrasy of the subject—of the Eranos Tagungen, its history, location(s), people, perhaps mostly its experiences. Its splendor results from Eranos’s…

Things Turned into Sounds: AristotleThe first voice we ought to listen to is that of Aristotle. At the beginning of his text Peri hermeneias (On Interpretation) Aristotle distinguishes between three degrees of human understanding.[1] There are, first, “affections in the soul” (en te psyche pathemátōn) that reflect within the soul, in alikeness, real things; secondly, “spoken sounds” (en te phōne)…

The Primary of the Persons in Politics: Empiricism and Political Philosophy. John von Heyking and Thomas Heilke, eds. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013.

Thomas Heilke’s and John von Heyking’s edited volume, The Primary of Persons in Politics: Empiricism and Political Philosophy, explores the nature of political activity by German political scientist, Tilo Schabert. In an empirical study…

The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence. Tilo Schabert. Translated by Javier Ibáñez-Noé. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Tilo Schabert’s The Second Birth is a philosopher’s book.Lest anyone misunderstand, this is an essay written by a genuine lover of wisdom for those others who take similar care to cultivate an attitude of love toward truth, goodness, justice…